The Realness of the Dutch: Performing Visual Evidence for National Differences

Abstract

From the 19th century on, textual comments to realistic images of people increasingly applied national categories. This essay analyses in which ways the relation between textual and visual information, between word and image, performs the images as visual evidence of national differences. The author identifies the possibility to describe a figure in terms of nationality as a precondition for national clichés. The understanding that nationality and national identities were 'objective facts' that can be visualized and the understanding that nationalities differed visually from each other was achieved by a series of reality effects, namely the repeated presentation of people in categories of the national.